Religiones. Una visión crítica

If in the two previous entries of this series we have seen that (contrarily to what Dembski’s filter suggests and needs) ‘law’ and ‘hazard’ are not different types of explanations, but necessary and complementary elements of basically all explanatory models, I will try to show here that ‘explanation from purpose’ is not as significantly different from ‘explanation from laws’ (or from models, to be more faithful to real scientific explanatory activity) as defenders of ‘Intelligent Design’ want us to accept, and as to entitle the separation of intelligent purpose as an independent horn of the EF.

Remember that ‘Dembski’s filter’ consists in the claim that the explanation of any phenomenon P should consist in an explanation by (a) ‘laws’, (b) ‘chance’, or (c) ‘purpose’. My argument in this entry is that our empirical knowledge of the world show us that ‘purpose’ and ‘design’ are just a particular type of capabilities that some empirically given entities or physical systems manifest, and hence that ‘explanation from purpose’ is just a specific type of ‘explanation by laws-(plus-hazard)”. Diamonds have the capacity of cutting crystal, stars have the capacity of transmuting chemical elements, tree leafs have the capacity of photosynthesising sugar, and certain types of animals (including us) have the capacity of conceiving plans and acting through making and following purposes. Empirically, there is, hence, no reason at all to separate intelligent action as an ontologically different type of ‘causal force’, or ‘explanation’. Of course, many things that can be done through the action of an intelligent animal (who, besides its intelligence, has a musculo-skeletal system capable of physically interacting with its environment in order to carry out the plans and goals it has conceived), cannot be done through any other known (or even conceivable) physical process. But this does not legitimise the conclusion that the claim ‘this is due to intelligent action’ is a scientifically valid explanation per se; what would be necessary to add to such a claim to transform it into a real explanation, is information about how the existence of the intelligent system initiated an empirically testable process whose final step was the result to be explained, for it is the theory about the causalprocess (not just about the causal ‘principle’ in which ‘intelligence’ would consist it) what has explanatory power.